Threads are definitely a worse experience. However, I think you're overestimating the ability of one's audience to transfer to another platform. It's hard enough to get someone to read something on Twitter, let alone get them to click through to another site.
Threads capitalize on the momentum of writing a good tweet, without losing a reader by making them go to another site.
That's why Twitter should've bought Medium and integrate it with Twitter. And then Twitter could've offered you to convert and transfer Twitter threads to Medium blog posts. Think of it as Facebook/Instagram interoperability.
As usual Twitter was slow and without vision and then Substack emerged.
Twitter is mismanaged and lacks vision. Vine, Periscope and Medium if further developed and integrated good could've made Twitter 10 times larger just like Instagram and YouTube made Facebook and Google worth at least $100bn more.
Do you really need a reader that is too lazy to click on your article? And from the reader point of view, I assume that whatever is written in twitter threads is not really that important, since the authors could not be bothered with writing in a proper and discoverable form.
is it laziness or just unwillingness to suffer the pain that comes from loading a modern day website monstrosity (cookie popup, newsletter popup, autoplay video, moving content, accidentally ad clicks)
Is this your personal view, or is it one that you're confident a lot of people share? I know plenty of writers on Twitter that have blogs and still write threads; this indicates that there's at least some benefit to capturing readers in that way.
I love blog posts and prefer them to threads. However, it being a thread won't prevent me from reading content from intelligent people on the internet.
You're missing out on some great insight by not reading something based purely on formatting. If I read someone's blog, I don't immediately assume that their Twitter threads are useless. Maybe their blog is for long-form content and the topic they want to discuss is shorter.
> There is something to be said for threads that provide a few "bullet points" of the article.
You're right, but those sentences are two fairly different animals. Tweeting the main points and linking to a blog post is great. Putting a blog post into a Twitter thread is awful.
The problem with twitter threads isn't that they're broken up into chunks, it's still relatively easy to read. The problem is what a cancerous, user hostile, and bloated website twitter is that won't even let you open the pictures without logging in. Nitter or threader fix this but at the point you're switching to a different website, why not just make it a blog.
the explosion of threads is because of twitter's algo...
to view a thread, you have to interact with a tweet. this interaction drives metrics that results in the tweet showing up more frequently in the algo-feed. the multi-post nature of a thread means there are more opportunities to "like/retweet" - which also drive the algo-feed.
all this increases follower count... and an audience (that's soon to be easily monetisable on twitter) is far more valuable than a blog... unfortunately
Indeed. The twitter algo seems so basic. Not a single week goes by without a cringey "html is a programming language" or "which is your favorite language, javascript or python" pushed to the top of my feed, with thousands of likes.
I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
A recent discussion on Hacker News on Medium had a number of posters say that without a presence on Medium they would not have found exposure for their writing [1].
If the platform gives you an audience, you can't underestimate that appeal for authors of any topic.
I started writing a blog on a niche topic in 2007 and continued writing fairly regularly until 2013. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!
At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts (which was important to me).
Today, there are lots of blogs - mostly corporate blogs writing about their products, or single author bloggers trying to establish their "personal brand". The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What's gone is the more personal voice of an author - more common when personal blogging was more prevalent. I think the heyday of personal blogging is mostly over. And that's a shame.
> But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
It only gives you an audience and retweets if you already have an audience and they retweet you. If I posted a Twitter thread, it would be nothing but crickets. It's extremely difficult to build up a Twitter following of 10,000 that are willing to interact with you and retweet your stuff in 2021 unless lots of people know you outside of Twitter. For the most part, the days of Twitter interaction are over. These days, it's mostly about self-promotion and existing brands.
I'm not saying anything about building an audience for a blog, only that Twitter is useless for nearly everyone. The massive engagement boost from one retweet is meaningless in terms of building an audience or having an impact outside of that tweet. A blog can get indexed by Google and bring in folks ten years from now. Tweets, in contrast, have a lifetime of a few hours and then they disappear into the ether. I'd much rather have a post hit the front page of HN than get 50 retweets (which would be in the extreme right tail of all tweets).
This is untrue, tweets are also index into Google (just not as rapidly) and tweets often resurface via images. Many Twitter moments are reminiscent by users via retweets or screenshot posts.
Authors often retweet their own post and even pin them to increase their longevity, giving a tweet a much longer shell life for engagement than a hyperlink.
That’s not to mentioned when the tweet is shared on other platforms like HN and more noticeably Reddit.
I also hesitated to write on medium or not. On the upside you get so much exposure but on the downside the platform itself is pretty crappy and it's not really "your own place". For now I continue on my personal blog but I recognise the advantage of Medium.
> I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
From a UX standpoint, for the writer, threads a great way to spin off thoughts without caring about the long-format.
Maybe there's an opportunity for existing blogging platforms to pick up this cue. Provide an app or experience that makes punching in a bunch of thoughts quick and easy then publish it as one post.
Posted this before (and it is a bad analogy I am sure) but I find moaning that something is in twitter is akin to moaning that someone told a story in a pub.
Pubs are noisy, and busy, and distracting, and I don't like them, and they aren't great for kids at night...
But it doesn't matter - the person was there, their friends were there, they had a story they wanted to tell and they told it in a way they enjoyed.
End of. Great if someone videoed it so others who don't like pubs could see it too, but mainly that doesn't happen. Just accept that some people like different things than you, and if it bothers you - take their content and blog about it, critique it and share it. But don't tell the story teller to change - especially if you want them to head somewhere where their friends are not... The point of a good story is to entertain an audience, wherever they may be.
I think this is a good analogy. But isn't it possible that some people really do not know that they should go on youtube and record their stories? It seems like the argument is trying to a priori settle the question of whether you should apply "Voice or exit" [1]
Threads hack the algorithm by driving up interaction, though. It’d be like if you were in a pub with millions of other people and instead of being able to talk to anyone the owner started recommending people to talk to based on little submissions by enterprising CEO of Mes.
Hi welcome to Jack’s. Drinks? What? No, but see that group of people over there… that dude (he/him) has quite the story to tell about the pitfalls of using css transforms when rendering responsive content on a certain older version of webkit. And see that group over to the left… that person (they/them) is real angry about something I have no idea what but other people are listening so you better head over. Oh and please walk through the queue… mind my little sign spinners if their wares interest you do entertain their incredible offers. Off you go!
I think Discord (and possibly still IRC) is the digital pub.
Most actively-posting accounts on Twitter are not "normal people", but rather either corporate PR brand ambassadors, or the same sorts of social climbers who write blog posts on LinkedIn. Of course they do what's algorithmically advantageous. That's why they're bothering to post to Twitter in the first place, instead of/in addition to the six other social networks they maintain a presence on.
I'm not sure mostnormal people are posting on Twitter, by that definition. It's a social network with global visibility of everything - you become an "influencer" the moment your account experiences even a modicum of success.
I wonder how many normal people are on twitter in the first place. I typically wait for news aggregators to share the thread with me. I don't need to drink from a firehose when a cup of water is all I need.
I would say I’m pretty normal and I frequent Twitter since it has a lot of content and instant news and instant discussions surrounding such news.
What is the metric for normal? Are we normal ? What’s the ratio between the general population and those who program? And to go even deeper, those who care about Programming, Cyber security, and tech news to frequent Hacker News in the first place? I would say Twitter population, lurkers and all , are a more accurate representation of the general population than HN is. You guys aren’t just quantifying the content not being shared by lurkers.
I like being able to respond to specific bits of what people have to say. While it has the distraction and noisy downside of a conversation occurring linearly in time, to me, that ability makes it better than a linear conversation in that way. Discord is now getting that with threads, though.
Cheers for the reply, I can't lie that in many ways I can agree with you, but at the same time twitter is where (across 2 or three different accounts) my contacts are. I've tried blogging in the past and felt like shouting in an empty room. At least on twitter I'll get some feedback.
I'd love to move all my contacts to a new service, but if I went off and blogged they are unlikely to follow me and as I can tell from my tweets, are unlikely to click on the links I post already.
All locations and services have their downsides, but I try to turn to the one where I'll have the most reach and personally get value from replies. In truth that means I do most of my 'story telling' face to face or on WhatsApp to closed groups or individuals ;)
> is akin to moaning that someone told a story in a pub.
There is a huge difference though. A person telling a story in a pub is basically trying mainly to have a good time with friends that are immediately there. There are no “pub influencers”. For the most part, news articles don’t go around quoting pub conversations. With Twitter, there is a more performative aspect. The use of Twitter is not just about sharing a good story with friends, but rather a desire to be known more broadly as a good story teller.
It is this aspect that turns a lot of people off to Twitter.
Except twitter is a choice made explicitly. It's like you are planning to make a lecture to your friends about an important subject, and of all possible venues you choose the noisiest, most packed pub, so your friends have to go there even though otherwise they wouldn't.
But it doesn't. The fish is rotten and the chips are cold and mushy. And the staff is abusive and rude, and you risk getting a beer bottle broken over your head any minute. The only reason why they come there is you. And that noisy pub makes billions of dollars - because people keep coming to it for no reason other than "my friends are there" - not noticing that their friends are there only because they wanted to find you, and if you found a better place, they'd follow you gladly. As Substack, for example, proved nicely.
Thank you for this. I love many blogs, but as you know many blogs out there are trees falling in the forest with no one around to hear them. Great coherent (and interesting) thoughts are just hard to consolidate in the blogging form factor. Getting a following is even harder and in todays world linking to blog posts is less likely to get readership. That said, I have no qualms with twitter threads as a medium for disseminating knowledge. It works in the public square for better or worse.
Threads are similar to slideshows - you can put a few bullet points that sound reasonably correct, but lacking in detail and context and you mostly forget about it after you read it, it's disposable.
A long-form narrative that is convincing and made to last and read repeatedly is much harder to write.
>Honestly, I don’t get why people do it. For the likes? For the shares?
I suspect the author already knows the answer but dances around it because any low-effort search engine query[1] would point to several articles explaining why:
- text that's directly on Twitter often has higher engagement than making people click external links[2]
- most people don't want to set up a blog -- especially if it's counterproductive to the 1st bullet point above
Yes, if they write on a true blog website, the improved readability will score points with some folks such as the author of this essay. Since variations of his argument have been repeated with no noticeable decline in Twitter threads, I think it shows that "blog readers" are a non-priority to influential Twitter users.
tldr: author lists the "true" reasons blogs are superior but completely misses the motivations for Twitter users to avoid blogs
Really really few bits of content deserve a blog post. Most written content is ephemeral and uninteresting two weeks from now. It's perfect to be buried in Twitter never to be seen again. There is certainly content that deserves better layout, better archiving and so on. But most written content on twitter isn't like that (at least in my feed). Also, having to leave Twitter and click a browser link is usually to disruptive for me when scrolling twitter. Information that doesn't come on the spoon loses my attention to the information in the next tweet.
Strongly agree - a blog post usually gets padded with tons of filler for SEO; and is prepended with 3 paragraphs of some "backstory" from the author's life as to why XYZ is now relevant or useful.
Twitter forces succinct and disposable thoughts.
Similarly, I would sooner read Twitter the rest of my life than ever touch another business book which are all glued together compilations of blog posts and/or the author's re-hash of research of 100+ academic papers. I mean, it's sort of understandable things have went this way; any original business thought of substantial merit has already been written about probably pre-1995. Twitter is good for catching the few little new age nuggets without re-reading 300 page books of the same drivel.
I understand both sides, if you have an audience on Twitter and want to quickly throw out a thread, it works for quick feedback, but at the expense of readability. If the thread is just a few Tweets long it isn't too bad, but beyond that it's hard to read.
Shameless plug: I launched Glue this year which succinctly put is like Twitter and Medium had a baby [1]. Glue has your standard microblogging features, but you can "expand" into a full blog post if you want [2]. I specifically wanted to tackle the melding of a microblogging timeline, long form writing (blogs) and the ability to use your own domain if you wish.
The problem is that you can get more page views on Twitter for something that takes a day to write than you'd be able to get in an entire year of blogging full time.
I'm not going to try to debate the merits of Twitter threads vs blog posts, but I will note that I, like many others, have an abandoned blog [1] but manage to post plenty of Twitter threads. The activation energy needed is just way lower on Twitter, and (as an academic) if I need to write something much more serious it'll usually be a paper.
If you want people to blog more and tweet less, you probably have to find a way to make it easier than firing off a tweet thread.
Edit: Also, I have to say – if blogs are such an inherently superior readability experience, why is engagement so much higher for Twitter? Perhaps it's shallow engagement, but it seems like the height of nerd-think to say that a platform actively used by hundreds of millions is "unusable".
Write a blog-post, and have a brief summary + link on Twitter?
------
The main benefits to the blog-post is that you get writings in exactly the format you want. Sure, Twitter does images and videos now, but there's still MathML, DotViz / Javascript graphs / etc. etc. that I can run on a blog that will never be allowed on Twitter. All possible with static-sites or low-dynamic sites (ex: low-CPU usage PHP).
Lets say you're a Chess blogger. Would you really want to be making .png files (images) of chess positions and talking about them? Or would you rather have a FEN/PGN-interpreter in Javascript on a blog-post? (First one on my search engine: https://mliebelt.github.io/PgnViewerJS/examples.html#1102)
No. You load up your favorite PGN-editor. You document the positions you think were interesting. You download the best PGN-interpreter you can find on Github onto your blog and let it rip.
The main benefit of Twitter is that the audience is there. Have your toxic comments spew out over Twitter, but your content remains on your site specifically.
------------
The reason why the HTML format is so powerful is because the writers can invent new formats specific to their communities (thanks to the magic of Javascript). Chess players have invented PGN to describe games. Tetris players have invented Fumen (a Javascript play-by-play of Tetris strategies). The Math community has LaTeX / MathML / MathJAX. Etc. etc.
But I think its ignoring the main benefit of blogging platforms: which is machine-assistance of converting custom-text formats (ex: Chess PGNs) into well-presented documents of text + images.
Twitter doesn't have Chess PGN viewers available. And even if Twitter did add ChessPGN viewers, they won't have the equivalent for your small, niche community.
From the stuff that gets pumped into my feed the purpose of most “threads” isn’t so much about sharing information as building an audience and gaining followers. Heck a lot of them just rehash blog posts written by someone else.
Anyway if gaining twitter followers is your real goal then taking them off platform isn’t the way to do it.
And if you're going to write a blog post please publish it somewhere where I'm not forced to open it in a private tab/disable JavaScript/manipulate my user agent or whatever else is now necessary in order to not give my info to a reader hostile platform.
I am one of those loonie cave dwellers who want nothing
to do with Twitter.
I find it to be a horrible UX in almost all ways.
The limit of how many characters you can type in a message
nearly guarantees clickbait, sensationalism, and idiocy.
Getting around this most fundamental part of Twitter,
with "threads", is a painful experience for the reader.
(In my opinion).
If Twitter included proper support for it, it would be better. Each post on a thread would appear directly after each other and stripped of unnecessary repeated parts.
Except now you have basically changed the main idea of Twitter and allow longer posts.
I like posting things on my blog.
I know I have only 3 readers, one of whom I pay
but you get a chance to build content in your own silo
and can be as long winded as you feel like.
I would have no interest in HN if it was not for the
thoughtful and high-quality long form discourse it has.
If a story is a link to Twitter I just click right onto
the discussion.
I guess my blog is a barren wasteland and I might pull
in 1 reader from Twitter
It is a horrible UX that makes it close to impossible
to convey a story. (Unless its "This is my headline" click here
Actually, I prefer to write a twitter thread first and then blog it. My 2c on this,
- Yes the ux sucks but people are used to reading threads.
- There are tools like thread reader app that unroll threads and store for future reference.
- tools like Dewey help manage threads.
- tools like chirr.app and typefully help create threads with nice heuristics that split your post into threads.
- You get distribution and get to grow an audience.
- specific tweets can be thought of as “highlights” that are retweeted vs liked
- it’s easier to
link other peoples tweets and threads, as well as your own to build a knowledge graph of sorts
- it forces you to think in small increments and build up your arguments in sequence. I’ve found it quite helpful in articulating thoughts.
- lastly, by publishing it on twitter and inviting debate, your audience could get you to rethink povs and also add more of them to your thinking. when you finally write a post, not only are they more likely to retweet and get you seen wider — they’ll feel an aspect of contribution to it which helps cement your relationship with them.
Many of these “fixes” suggests that your reader have a Twitter account.
People who use Twitter frequently assumes that most people use the platform, which isn’t really true.
Still, I can’t fault people for posting longer Twitter threads. Even if setting up a blog is pretty easy, they already have a platform, however flawed it might be. Also few people want to set up a blog for a single story, especially when the target audience was originally other Twitter user.
Yeah i think in the spirit of “write every day” and “ship often”, twitter allows you to go from single tweets to threads in an instant, vs a blog where you might agonize over whether it’s ready to publish or not.
Not sure if this is a serious question or not, but OP tells us in the /about page. To quote:
This site is built upon WordPress. I use a custom child theme that calls the excellent GeneratePress Pro theme. I have a lifetime subscription to GeneratePress, and it’s worth every penny.
The font I use on this site is Fira Sans Condensed, which is (in my opinion) a beautiful sans-serif font, created by Mozilla.`
143 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadThreads capitalize on the momentum of writing a good tweet, without losing a reader by making them go to another site.
As usual Twitter was slow and without vision and then Substack emerged.
I love blog posts and prefer them to threads. However, it being a thread won't prevent me from reading content from intelligent people on the internet.
You're missing out on some great insight by not reading something based purely on formatting. If I read someone's blog, I don't immediately assume that their Twitter threads are useless. Maybe their blog is for long-form content and the topic they want to discuss is shorter.
Exactly my thinking too.
There is something to be said for threads that provide a few "bullet points" of the article.
I would agree with the author when the threads get crazy long, or if the tweets don't encapsulate a single point.
> There is something to be said for threads that provide a few "bullet points" of the article.
You're right, but those sentences are two fairly different animals. Tweeting the main points and linking to a blog post is great. Putting a blog post into a Twitter thread is awful.
to view a thread, you have to interact with a tweet. this interaction drives metrics that results in the tweet showing up more frequently in the algo-feed. the multi-post nature of a thread means there are more opportunities to "like/retweet" - which also drive the algo-feed.
all this increases follower count... and an audience (that's soon to be easily monetisable on twitter) is far more valuable than a blog... unfortunately
A recent discussion on Hacker News on Medium had a number of posters say that without a presence on Medium they would not have found exposure for their writing [1].
If the platform gives you an audience, you can't underestimate that appeal for authors of any topic.
I started writing a blog on a niche topic in 2007 and continued writing fairly regularly until 2013. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!
At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts (which was important to me).
Today, there are lots of blogs - mostly corporate blogs writing about their products, or single author bloggers trying to establish their "personal brand". The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What's gone is the more personal voice of an author - more common when personal blogging was more prevalent. I think the heyday of personal blogging is mostly over. And that's a shame.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493431
It only gives you an audience and retweets if you already have an audience and they retweet you. If I posted a Twitter thread, it would be nothing but crickets. It's extremely difficult to build up a Twitter following of 10,000 that are willing to interact with you and retweet your stuff in 2021 unless lots of people know you outside of Twitter. For the most part, the days of Twitter interaction are over. These days, it's mostly about self-promotion and existing brands.
All it takes is one retweet to give you a massive engagement boost, so you don’t even need an audience to have an impact on Twitter.
Authors often retweet their own post and even pin them to increase their longevity, giving a tweet a much longer shell life for engagement than a hyperlink.
That’s not to mentioned when the tweet is shared on other platforms like HN and more noticeably Reddit.
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
Couldn’t agree more, and I also agree that it’s a real shame.
Maybe there's an opportunity for existing blogging platforms to pick up this cue. Provide an app or experience that makes punching in a bunch of thoughts quick and easy then publish it as one post.
Pubs are noisy, and busy, and distracting, and I don't like them, and they aren't great for kids at night...
But it doesn't matter - the person was there, their friends were there, they had a story they wanted to tell and they told it in a way they enjoyed.
End of. Great if someone videoed it so others who don't like pubs could see it too, but mainly that doesn't happen. Just accept that some people like different things than you, and if it bothers you - take their content and blog about it, critique it and share it. But don't tell the story teller to change - especially if you want them to head somewhere where their friends are not... The point of a good story is to entertain an audience, wherever they may be.
1 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
Hi welcome to Jack’s. Drinks? What? No, but see that group of people over there… that dude (he/him) has quite the story to tell about the pitfalls of using css transforms when rendering responsive content on a certain older version of webkit. And see that group over to the left… that person (they/them) is real angry about something I have no idea what but other people are listening so you better head over. Oh and please walk through the queue… mind my little sign spinners if their wares interest you do entertain their incredible offers. Off you go!
I think Discord (and possibly still IRC) is the digital pub.
What is the metric for normal? Are we normal ? What’s the ratio between the general population and those who program? And to go even deeper, those who care about Programming, Cyber security, and tech news to frequent Hacker News in the first place? I would say Twitter population, lurkers and all , are a more accurate representation of the general population than HN is. You guys aren’t just quantifying the content not being shared by lurkers.
I really like this analogy as it gives a different perspective. Thanks for that.
In fairness to me though, I never told anyone to change - I simply gave my opinion then questioned why people find it useful and get value from it.
Though, in fairness to ljf, your tl;dr at the top says "Please stop; write a blog post instead."
I'd love to move all my contacts to a new service, but if I went off and blogged they are unlikely to follow me and as I can tell from my tweets, are unlikely to click on the links I post already.
All locations and services have their downsides, but I try to turn to the one where I'll have the most reach and personally get value from replies. In truth that means I do most of my 'story telling' face to face or on WhatsApp to closed groups or individuals ;)
There is a huge difference though. A person telling a story in a pub is basically trying mainly to have a good time with friends that are immediately there. There are no “pub influencers”. For the most part, news articles don’t go around quoting pub conversations. With Twitter, there is a more performative aspect. The use of Twitter is not just about sharing a good story with friends, but rather a desire to be known more broadly as a good story teller.
It is this aspect that turns a lot of people off to Twitter.
A long-form narrative that is convincing and made to last and read repeatedly is much harder to write.
I suspect the author already knows the answer but dances around it because any low-effort search engine query[1] would point to several articles explaining why:
- text that's directly on Twitter often has higher engagement than making people click external links[2]
- most people don't want to set up a blog -- especially if it's counterproductive to the 1st bullet point above
Yes, if they write on a true blog website, the improved readability will score points with some folks such as the author of this essay. Since variations of his argument have been repeated with no noticeable decline in Twitter threads, I think it shows that "blog readers" are a non-priority to influential Twitter users.
tldr: author lists the "true" reasons blogs are superior but completely misses the motivations for Twitter users to avoid blogs
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+people+post+twitter+t...
[2] https://buffer.com/resources/twitter-thread-experiment#the-p...
Twitter forces succinct and disposable thoughts.
Similarly, I would sooner read Twitter the rest of my life than ever touch another business book which are all glued together compilations of blog posts and/or the author's re-hash of research of 100+ academic papers. I mean, it's sort of understandable things have went this way; any original business thought of substantial merit has already been written about probably pre-1995. Twitter is good for catching the few little new age nuggets without re-reading 300 page books of the same drivel.
Shameless plug: I launched Glue this year which succinctly put is like Twitter and Medium had a baby [1]. Glue has your standard microblogging features, but you can "expand" into a full blog post if you want [2]. I specifically wanted to tackle the melding of a microblogging timeline, long form writing (blogs) and the ability to use your own domain if you wish.
[1] https://glue.im/noah
[2] https://glue.im/noah/the-story-of-twitpic
- https://bearblog.dev/
- https://smol.pub/ (shameless plug)
If you want people to blog more and tweet less, you probably have to find a way to make it easier than firing off a tweet thread.
Edit: Also, I have to say – if blogs are such an inherently superior readability experience, why is engagement so much higher for Twitter? Perhaps it's shallow engagement, but it seems like the height of nerd-think to say that a platform actively used by hundreds of millions is "unusable".
[1] https://moyix.blogspot.com/
Write a blog-post, and have a brief summary + link on Twitter?
------
The main benefits to the blog-post is that you get writings in exactly the format you want. Sure, Twitter does images and videos now, but there's still MathML, DotViz / Javascript graphs / etc. etc. that I can run on a blog that will never be allowed on Twitter. All possible with static-sites or low-dynamic sites (ex: low-CPU usage PHP).
Lets say you're a Chess blogger. Would you really want to be making .png files (images) of chess positions and talking about them? Or would you rather have a FEN/PGN-interpreter in Javascript on a blog-post? (First one on my search engine: https://mliebelt.github.io/PgnViewerJS/examples.html#1102)
No. You load up your favorite PGN-editor. You document the positions you think were interesting. You download the best PGN-interpreter you can find on Github onto your blog and let it rip.
The main benefit of Twitter is that the audience is there. Have your toxic comments spew out over Twitter, but your content remains on your site specifically.
------------
The reason why the HTML format is so powerful is because the writers can invent new formats specific to their communities (thanks to the magic of Javascript). Chess players have invented PGN to describe games. Tetris players have invented Fumen (a Javascript play-by-play of Tetris strategies). The Math community has LaTeX / MathML / MathJAX. Etc. etc.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-weirdest-chess-openin...
Twitter doesn't have Chess PGN viewers available. And even if Twitter did add ChessPGN viewers, they won't have the equivalent for your small, niche community.
Anyway if gaining twitter followers is your real goal then taking them off platform isn’t the way to do it.
I find it to be a horrible UX in almost all ways.
The limit of how many characters you can type in a message nearly guarantees clickbait, sensationalism, and idiocy.
Getting around this most fundamental part of Twitter, with "threads", is a painful experience for the reader. (In my opinion).
If Twitter included proper support for it, it would be better. Each post on a thread would appear directly after each other and stripped of unnecessary repeated parts. Except now you have basically changed the main idea of Twitter and allow longer posts.
I like posting things on my blog. I know I have only 3 readers, one of whom I pay but you get a chance to build content in your own silo and can be as long winded as you feel like.
I would have no interest in HN if it was not for the thoughtful and high-quality long form discourse it has.
If a story is a link to Twitter I just click right onto the discussion.
I guess my blog is a barren wasteland and I might pull in 1 reader from Twitter
It is a horrible UX that makes it close to impossible to convey a story. (Unless its "This is my headline" click here
- Yes the ux sucks but people are used to reading threads.
- There are tools like thread reader app that unroll threads and store for future reference.
- tools like Dewey help manage threads.
- tools like chirr.app and typefully help create threads with nice heuristics that split your post into threads.
- You get distribution and get to grow an audience.
- specific tweets can be thought of as “highlights” that are retweeted vs liked
- it’s easier to link other peoples tweets and threads, as well as your own to build a knowledge graph of sorts
- it forces you to think in small increments and build up your arguments in sequence. I’ve found it quite helpful in articulating thoughts.
- lastly, by publishing it on twitter and inviting debate, your audience could get you to rethink povs and also add more of them to your thinking. when you finally write a post, not only are they more likely to retweet and get you seen wider — they’ll feel an aspect of contribution to it which helps cement your relationship with them.
People who use Twitter frequently assumes that most people use the platform, which isn’t really true.
Still, I can’t fault people for posting longer Twitter threads. Even if setting up a blog is pretty easy, they already have a platform, however flawed it might be. Also few people want to set up a blog for a single story, especially when the target audience was originally other Twitter user.
Thanks for the kind words about the site - there’s still more I want to do to optimise further, like get rid of bloody Jquery for a start!
Having said that, half a MB is a lot of data. You can do a lot with it.